Stories and thoughts on creating, evolving, and offering a great total customer experience

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What is Total CX?

Nothing is more fun than swapping horror stories about bad (or good, or weird) customer experiences you’ve had. And TotalCX is a place where you can do just that. However, it isn’t just a place for stories—it’s also a place to figure out how the customer experience should have been…what exactly went wrong…how to best improve it…and what lessons can we learn from it.

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Ebusiness

08/01/2014

This week, I wrote about the fact that taking advantage of daily deal vouchers to try new venues/merchants does not lead to repeat business nor loyal customers.

You see, daily deals aren’t like retail loss leaders, where a merchant offers a few items at extreme discounts in hopes that shoppers will pick up other merchandise—lots of other regularly priced merchandise—while in the store.

Daily deals are typically for a one-time event, such as a meal, a massage, a weekend getaway, or junk removal. While you might order more from the menu than the limit of the voucher’s value, or spring for the extra aroma therapy during your massage, the discounted experience is still something you are trying out because the price was discounted. And once tried, the relationship is over. There is little incentive to come back at full price even if the customer has a good experience. At least, not on its own. There needs to be follow-up marketing efforts to encourage bargain shoppers to come back for another visit.

Using daily deals to attract new customers is a solid marketing concept. But it needs to be part of a broader marketing plan that entices customers to return again and again. Loss leaders do not make loyal customers. Great products, service, customer experience, and nurturing of the customer relationship keep them coming back.

05/05/2014

With the $20 price increase that Amazon recently made on Amazon Prime membership (from $79 to $99 per year), the company needs to justify the increase by offering more member benefits. Amazon has been touting the free monthly streaming videos and other Prime features.

In addition, on April 24, 2014, Amazon introduced Prime Pantry, a service available to Amazon Prime members only, which is seemingly based on the U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes, where you pay one rate no matter the weight or where the package is going.

The Prime Pantry website states, “Adding your first Prime Pantry item to Cart starts a Prime Pantry box. As you shop, you see that each Pantry item tells you what percentage of a Pantry box it fills based on its size and weight. Pantry boxes are large and can hold up to 45 pounds or four cubic feet of household products. As you check items off your list, we continuously track and show you how full your box is. You can buy as much or as little as you want for a flat $5.99 delivery fee per Prime Pantry box.”

Items available from the Pantry system include beverages, specific food and snacks, standard cooking supplies, personal care items, cleaning items, and pet food.

Note that the per-box fee is additional beyond the yearly $99 membership fee. Thus this “benefit” is also a revenue generator for Amazon.

03/20/2014

For those of us who are frequent Amazon.com shoppers, Prime Membership has been a great benefit. For $79 per year, you got free two-day shipping on most purchases (except ones sent directly from third-party partners who aren’t on board with Prime shipping). So many of us use Amazon Prime free shipping that it was a major contributor to the UPS shipping problems last holiday season (see “Recovering from the Crisis of Missed Holiday Deliveries”).

I, personally, love it! I know that I can get my purchases in two days, and I don’t incur additional costs over the price of the items I’ve bought. And, with Amazon now charging sales tax on some items, this savings is even more welcome.

But now Amazon has announced that the Prime Membership fee will be raised to $99 per year. For me, that probably is still a good deal since I do my online shopping on Amazon whenever possible—primarily because of the Prime benefits. Indeed, when searching for products, I usually start by filtering by “eligible for Prime shipping” and only remove that filter if I can’t find what I want from the available items.

01/10/2014

Gift delivery issues plagued last-minute online shoppers this holiday season (and some not-so-last-minute shoppers). As Ronni Marshak explains, the 2013 holiday season created a perfect storm of anomalies that blew apart even the best designed fulfillment and delivery systems.

Design for Screw-Ups. I never cease to be amazed when our business processes and well-designed systems can’t adapt to “sh*t happens.” In my experience as both a customer experience designer and a business and consumer customer, stuff ALWAYS happens. Things ALWAYS go wrong. So, the first lesson to be learned from debacles, like hundreds of thousands of Christmas gifts not arriving in time for Christmas, is this: Why don’t we design for exceptions?? Since exceptions ARE the norm, why do we keep trying to design smooth-flowing processes that rely on everything working within spec? Why don’t we design systems that are based on uncertainty? Why can’t we make our processes more adaptive and empower our people to be more creative and resilient? While it’s true that every company puts in place belt and suspender back-up plans and systems for high-volume periods, it’s also true that we’re still relying largely on straight through processing with exception handling. What if we changed our paradigm and decided that everything is a potential exception? Would we design different systems and processes? I’m sure they would be more loosely-coupled and more resilient than the ones we’re using today.

Design within and across Ecosystems. I’m sure that logistics experts design holistically. They take everything into account: weather, seasonality, advertising and promotions, supply chain logjams, and irrational customer expectations. But how many designers are thinking in terms of customer scenario-based ecosystems and the cumulative impact when Amazon’s ecosystem + Target’s ecosystem + Wal-Mart’s ecosystem + lots of little mom and pop shops selling online are all combined to deliver a single customer scenario: getting the right gifts to the right people on time? If Santa can do it, why can’t we?

Recover Gracefully. Customers are actually quite forgiving, particularly when weather and logistics—things beyond your control—are involved. But you need to make amends proactively, with elegance and grace in order to assuage angry customers. Ronni Marshak offers some good tips in her article—things you can do throughout the year, whenever the unexpected happens. (And it happens a lot!)

01/07/2014

To kick off the New Year, we offer you our best articles from last year. In fact, in order to make it easy for you to read these, we’ve removed the “paywall” for all of them for 30 days. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to sample those you haven’t noticed or had time to read during the last 12 months.

Every week we publish a new article. Each one takes hours of research, thought, and preparation. Which of these articles did anyone read? Of the visitors to the Customers.com website in 2013, the largest number of you landed on, lingered on, and/or downloaded these 5 of the 60 articles we published last year.

11/30/2012

What did
you do after stuffing your face with turkey and all the fixings? If
you’re like most of us in the U.S., you shopped! In-store, online, or
combining the two, alone, or with family members, the call of the sale
price lured us in as we fought our way out of our food comas and
football immersions.

Patty Seybold has identified a number of shopping trends surfaced by the sales statistics that have resulted from Black Friday thru Cyber Monday, including:

Social shopping with family members and friends.

Shared online shopping using tablets that get passed around to show each other things they’re interested in.

Earlier retail openings on Thanksgiving evening.

In-store
group shopping with someone as the smartphone guru, responsible for
price checking, while other family members use their phones for
logistics and coordination.

Solo Cyber Monday shopping focused on getting the best deals.

Online retailers offering waves of deals throughout the long weekend to encourage shoppers to visit their sites often.

So, did
you follow the trends? If you’re like me, you will be getting very
chummy with the UPS delivery person over the next few weeks as I revel
in my online shopping deals.

~ Ronni

Shopping Smarter with Mobile Devices Changes the Face of Holiday ShoppingMobile Makes Its Mark on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Sales in 2012By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, November 29, 2012
How does consumers’ use of mobile devices change the way they shop?
The detailed shopping statistics from the five-day kick-off of the 2012
holiday shopping season gives us some clues. “Couch Commerce” was
popular on Thanksgiving, as friends and family passed computer tablets
around. Price comparisons on mobile apps helped in-store shoppers find
the best deals. On Cyber Monday, power shoppers used laptops and tablets
more than phones to grab deals.

10/19/2012

How do
you evolve your customer-facing e-commerce and customer service site(s)
and your online customer-community in synch with one another? That’s the
question that must be facing Sears’ management as they brace themselves
for another brutally competitive holiday retail season. We don’t know
how Sears has organized its staffing and reporting structure to support
its various web properties, but, based on Ronni Marshak’s customer
experience audit of Sears’ newly updated online community site(s), Sears
to have a fragmented, rather than a unified approach to content,
commerce, and community.

06/11/2012

We define personalization as the delivery of the most relevant and engaging content (such as products, images, or articles) for the visitor’s current task. There are different approaches to adapting customer interactions to the audience, including targeting, tailoring, customizing, segmenting, and personalizing. Personalization is the only approach that requires identifying and responding to a person. This identification might be anonymous or by name and might be performed via cookie or by log in.

Which Customer Scenarios? In order to personalize your customer experience, you need to consider the most important customer experiences your business supports. We find it useful to think in terms of specific customer scenarios. A customer scenario comprises a customer, a customer goal, and the ideal path to achieving that goal. For example, a new mother wants to feel confident that her child will get the education he deserves. She wants to quell her anxiety about the child’s future. From the business’s point of view, this is a person who should sign up for an education savings and investment product. Mother and business have congruent but different goals. Understanding the parent’s situation and perceptions will enable the business to be more successful in both marketing to her and serving her.

Do You Have the Data You Need? Do you have access to the data required to support the personalization you want? Data supporting personalization is wide ranging and frequently big. It includes environment data, such as time zone, device, country, and browser type; site behavior data, such as past visit patterns, purchases, and campaign exposure; referrer data such as domain, campaign, social graph, and affiliate; transitory data such as time, weekday, and recency of visits; and data from other sites and systems, such as call center and third-party data.

How much will it cost to get and use the data? How difficult will it be to be granted access to the data? What customer data will be useful, and where is it? What product data will be needed? What information about content will be useful, and, if we don’t have that information, how will we create it? Data accessibility will determine what personalization approaches are possible. The value of achieving various personalization features will determine how much the data is worth to your business and encourage initiatives to acquire and improve data.

06/08/2012

Bakers Shoes is a chain of retail stores with extensive online properties for engaging its customers. Importantly for Bakers Shoes’ future, it has established successful mechanisms to increase intimacy with customers – and collects masses of data about those customers. Using Facebook and its own Shoeternity site and blog, Bakers Shoes collects implicit data about customer preferences.

Bakers Shoes’ strategy for its online and mobile resources is based on analysis of interaction data and unceasing testing of designs, paths, and offers. For example, traffic analysis revealed that customers were using its mobile site to read reviews and check inventory before going to a store. This analysis convinced Bakers Shoes to abandon the mobile app tactic and invest in ongoing improvement of its mobile site. Bakers Shoes personalizes product recommendations automatically, leading to an increase in average order value of 40 percent for orders where the customer has clicked on one of these recommendations. Tactics for recommendations and offers are constantly tested and optimized to continually improve sales results.

Bakers Shoes’ Facebook page presents style suggestions, collects likes and customer comments, and, of course, clickthroughs to the commerce site. Shoeternity takes friendship further: this is the site where customers post photos of their “looks” and post comments and likes about the posts of others. Posts are extensively tagged with words describing the shoes, the effect, and the environment for wearing the look. I can search these tags to find out if animal prints (tiger, zebra, etc.) are out of fashion. Only five posts use the words “animal print,” and none this year. OK, forget the giraffe-print booties; they are so last year.

Bakers Shoes can use this trove of data in automatically select products to recommend to shoppers, in making stocking decisions, in choosing images for banners and other ads, and in choosing topics for Facebook and Shoeternity blog posts.

Bakers Shoes has created a mobile site that is consistent with the web site, but with simplified navigation and displays. The shoes selected in response to a navigation choice are those most likely to interest the customer. In a click, the customer can like it, order it, or find a store that carries it.

07/30/2010

"All Business is E-Business," Christer Ljungdahl (one of "Patty's
Visionaries"), reminds me almost every time we talk. Christer has been
responsible for years for leading and evolving National Instruments'
Internet strategy—for customers as well as employees and partners. NI's
Internet strategy and evolving infrastructure have fostered tons of
customer-led innovation, as hundreds of thousands of scientists and
engineers from thousands of disciplines share their epiphanies and their
struggles, as kids and their mentors play with LEGO Mindstorms robots
to spawn the next generation of sensor-savvy engineers, and as NI
releases new intelligent plug and play products to help us make sense of
and
interact with the physical world. Christer's Internet strategy goes
way beyond the basics that I described 12 years ago in Customers.com Classic. Yet he
has clearly mastered all of the 7 basics that those early Internet
Visionaries put in place.

Here's the second chapter of the
revised Customers.com Handbook—designed to
complement Customers.com Classic
with a set of How To's and basic building blocks for anyone who wants to
refresh their e-business strategy or is working on their mobile
strategy. As we move on to (or back to) the future in social media and
community, it's a good idea to make sure that you haven't neglected the
basic customer-centric building blocks in crafting your outside-in,
customer-centric (e-)business strategy.